


Possession Being Nine-Tenths...

by helena_s_renn



Series: Eleven Strings – yksitoista kieltä [24]
Category: Def Leppard, Sonata Arctica
Genre: Dubious Consent, Eavesdropping, Jealousy, M/M, Obsessive thoughts, Pining, References to Drugs, other Def Leppard band members mentioned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-15
Updated: 2018-04-15
Packaged: 2019-04-17 18:33:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14195142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/helena_s_renn/pseuds/helena_s_renn
Summary: Joe's POV as he recounts how Sav seems different as they start a new leg of the tour. Later, he comes face to face with why, as in who. Years' worth of Joe's memories and reflections come to light as well.I think he needs professional help...





	Possession Being Nine-Tenths...

**Author's Note:**

> This one goes further, darker, more obsessive than I am personally comfortable with. The man (his muse) has been carrying on like this for a week now. No one shuts Joe up. Might as well post it. 
> 
> The usual disclaimers of 'this is fiction' apply. It's not real, and is not meant to be interpreted as such. The characters should not be confused the RL people whose physical appearances these are the idealised versions of. 
> 
> As with the previous two installments, the premise is that Jani was on DL's crew roster as Sav's bass tech during the 2007 tour. 
> 
> Neither Joe nor the author are taking a cheap shot at the band named as, "we're not..." That's just Joe being Joe, finding one more reason why they don't need a certain redhead around.
> 
> Beta, review, and much more by ChristianHowe. Any remaining errors are mine.

-2006 - 2007 with multiple flashbacks

Something was noticeably different about Sav when we started the second leg. He seemed more relaxed in his movements. Also, cagier. He'd quit smoking and he barely drank. With a tiny practice amp he started dragging around everywhere, he was playing a lot more, including classics from the 60's and 70's - we never did covers other than the Yeah set - and some unfamiliar songs in a style I couldn't quite put my finger on. He had a hard time with it at first, sometimes replaying the same two bars over and over, a hundred times if needed, first in half notes till he could speed up. I wondered why. They weren't our songs, nor our genre. When I asked, he replied vaguely, "Side project."

That set me on my arse. He'd never taken an interest in playing with any other band. I'd dragged him with me a couple of times, to compilation one-offs done for publicity. He hated the hype, the competing egos, and the improv nature of the musical bit. So who could have convinced him to leave his comfort zone? When asked who he was working with, he shooed me off saying, "Not set in stone yet."

Sometimes I'd overhear his voice on phone calls at odd hours. We were all an inconvenient 1/4 to 1/3 of a day removed from our UK loved ones. His time change seemed to be a little bit more. He'd be on his mobile earlier, or much later. In the bus, through hotel room walls, passing in hallways, he kept it low enough I could rarely make out words; he definitely wasn't talking to his mum. How many times he turned his back to me while speaking hushed and secretive or laughing, something that was too rare, that autumn, I can't count.

The suspicions I'd had all along starting with him neglecting to return my calls on break were confirmed one night - morning - around 5:00AM West Coast time. Our hotel arrangement had us sleeping headboard to headboard, the wall between. Every stop, I'd call ahead and ask them to put us in adjoining rooms if they could, always hoping that he'd knock on or simply walk through the inside door. Never happened. But that day, I woke to moaning and grunting, interspersed with quiet but audible bits of dialogue about getting naked, hard dicks and balls so full, tiny nipples, thighs spreading; lick you and suck me and take it and fuck, fuck, fuck.

My ears burned, my face flushed hot, the snake between my legs instantly up and on high alert, ready to stake my unclaimed property in the face of anyone else getting a piece of him. This wasn't some post-gig one-off, this was pre-arranged. With that degree of heat, the practiced phrasing of such very personal, intimate words, there's no way it was the first time. "No, no...!" both my upstairs and downstairs brains screamed simultaneously, silently. "He's mine, my Sav, my love, now and then, mine..."

He was chanting fuck, fuck, while I was agonising mine, mine. Whoever his bird was, I'd run her off if I had to. Wouldn't be the first time, nor was he the wiser about such things, but then he doesn't pair up easily. I don't mean the occasional groupie. I'll be the first to admit that there was a time we were all some of the biggest man-whores on the planet. When it's thrown at you for free, hell yeah, we were horny young men, what would you expect? That still happens to a degree, although nothing like the smorgasbord of human flesh offered to us nightly back in the 80's. But I mean... how could he commit, when the only man he'd ever fallen in love with basically killed himself with drink without a thought of his actual lover, nor of Sav, who was shut down and on the verge of following him when I... let him grieve on and in my body. That was how I made my move.

It didn't bring us together for longer than a few alcohol-soaked days. Our sex was incredible, or I thought it was. Being with him lived up to my highest expectations. He'd alternately be sobbing, screaming, growling, never letting up in whatever the mode of overwhelming emotion. I'd known it, sensed it. How it would be. How could it be any other way? He kisses in a language all his own, don't get me started about what he moves like between that and when he was begging me to fill every void. Such loss of decorum should have embarrassed us both to no end. We're British, after all. It's possible that it did, him. We sure as hell never talked about that week again, well, not that part of it. What started it has been rehashed ad infinitum.

Nor did it bring us closer, as far as friendship. That aspect stayed at the same level as ever. Well, I'd thought at the time, I'd just wait it out till he was done mourning and it would be worth it. By now, I've counted how many years of toeing the line of good mate? Before that, there'd been a decade of watching him pining, being used and tossed aside and pining some more, first with a sort of detached curiosity, but more and more, I wanted him, felt like I actually loved him. Hell, I played surrogate in the loony bin as much for him as for Steve - or myself.

Yes, we were mates. Are mates. Like everyone. We drank together, had meals together, lived on tour buses together for months on end. I knew his masturbatory habits for Christ's sake. We wrote music together, sometimes like we were four hands and two voices giving vent to one mind. He digs deep, I guess. Feels it. We've both always been part of the creative process. But... well, let's just say inspiration is fickle, and stripped-down repetition gets boring as hell.

Somewhere along the line, I'd decided: When he'd had enough solitary, he would come to me without the crutch of booze or coke or X or whatever we'd been doing those fingers-on-one-hand more times. Guilty secrets. I doubted he consciously remembered, shoved what he must have considered relapses into some dark corner and left to pale. He'd needed me, under duress. Like the first anniversary of Steve's passing, a difficult day for all of us. The tenth anniversary, for that matter. Or like when he developed Bell's. By the time he finally let me comfort him, he'd already recovered a lot of what he'd lost, but had chopped off his hair and stopped caring about much of anything but getting stoned. Medical, my arse. He actually believed me when I completely lost myself in him, rocked him like a baby... well, not exactly but he, he let me. I'm sure no one else would have dared but me: I spent hours kissing the affected side of his face while I kept him under me, sometimes fucking but sometimes just talking, telling him how much he was loved, how important he was, that he was still a beautiful person through and through no matter what his face did.

He... thanked me. Which was weird. Said that he'd been ready to melt into obscurity and become one of those 'never heard from again' stories, but now he was ready to _face things_. The show must go on. He was sorry to have troubled me. Other than throwing me out on my arse or him not having been... forcibly jostled... out of his funk, that was the opposite of what I'd thought to accomplish. When he calls me, comes to me, I want it to be a revelation, a lightening bolt, an epiphany. It was easiest to conclude that Sav had cordoned himself off for so long, he didn't know how to be close with anyone; he didn't even know how to want that. It seemed like all his relationships with women were half-hearted, one-sided, short lived.

Someone on the other end of his mobile was proving me wrong. Holding his interest from thousands of miles away, for months, apparently. Getting him off so hard he was almost hyperventilating. That was supposed to be my job! Me, who would pick up his broken pieces, mend his heart for once and for good. I'd remained ever watchful, and somehow, it, whatever it was, had happened far away from my surveillance.

He swore and called some name, Loni or maybe Annie, I blocked it out. I swear I could hear him come, like, that point where his body tipped over from 'so close, so close', spring-loaded, to where the sweetest fluid flowed into his bloodstream while his balls broke and spurted seed into his sheets.

Mortified, I heard myself screech a name, too. His. Powerless to stop mid-orgasm, I cursed god. At the end, I kicked the come-soaked sheet off the bed and sat up, shaking, head in hands. It would likely be weeks before he'd look me in the eye again. Maybe twenty seconds later, there were two knocks on the wall, eerily close to where I sat in the dark.

"Joe... go to sleep," I heard his deliberately audible voice through the wall. Putting my hand on the spot I estimated he'd rapped on, I rubbed another one out but as the sun rose, finally dropped off.

...

He wouldn't spill the beans, though. Blokish ribbing didn't work, nor hinting, nor point-blank third-degree. He didn't deny, nor confirm, that there was 'someone'. No details were forthcoming at all. He would not protect the identity of someone he didn't care about. Never were there any pictures, no little blips in newspapers, nothing online. The longer it lasted, the meaner I got. The bleak, cold months of winter were interminable. As we'd ended the tour I'd still known next to nothing, which ate me alive.

That left me more time than ever to obsess about it. I wrote songs of pique and rejection, the infinite sadness of feeling sorry for one's self. "Burnout", everyone thinks it's a tongue-in-cheek invective about my stalker. Read the fucking words. What was I even doing? Move on, I kept telling myself. He's not some fragile precious snowflake who will melt without your frigid cold. I tried to take stock of why I couldn't.

It's impossible to quantify. I mean, yeah, what he looks like. Fine. Let's get that out of the way. I can't help it any more than he can. His body, which he's never been scared to display, neither his skin nor his movements. That transformation on stage, into totally uninhibited, confident, stalking animal. No one should get to look like that at our age. I got fat and poor Phil's hairline keeps crawling back and Viv's face just gets longer. Rick and Rick, those two little bastards! What's in a name, huh? Rick certainly did not make it through unscathed, though. Well, actually, neither of them did.

He tends to surprise us all when it comes to recording, it's one of those little delights, one of those Sav things. He was heavy and solid in our early years. Mutt shoved his bass to the back and his voice into the high end of the backing tracks. Slang, though, he slid and he chugged and he made some weird-ass noises that had us all laughing in the midst of the beautiful disaster of it. Euphoria. His idea, his name; he bonded us all together again, the new and the old.

Sav, bless his heart, has not one mean bone in his body; subterfuge is unimaginable to him. Not an old soul. New to heaven and earth. Something about him shines, everyone gravitates. He says what he means and means what he says to the best of his ability. His lack of that one certain degree of feeling for me, it's never been spite or deliberate nastiness. More like, it's below his radar. That's something I've had to make peace with.

People wouldn't think so but he's quite shy, somewhat claustrophobic; I have always been able to see what it costs him to be surrounded by so many strangers on tour. Heh, fans. One is stranger than the next. We put him on the end of the meet and greet line, and those who pay for photo ops 'get to' stand between the more gregarious of us: me and Phil, or me and Viv. That's one small thing I can do for him.

Another is vet the techs. Personality is just as important as knowledge of effects and gidgy-gadgets and how to change channels. Imagine my surprise when, for the first time since we became successful enough to warrant techs, he made a stand about who he wanted running his rig. Well, I knew why the second I saw the two of them within ten feet of each other. A person would have to be blind and stupid not to. They couldn't keep their eyes off each other, and even when they did, the attraction and fuck it, the _connection_ was practically visible in the air between them. Sav hadn't been carrying on with a woman... but with a bloke! I of all people was more than aware that Sav was no virgin in that regard but it still shocked me speechless for five seconds before the betrayal hit me.

I detested him on sight - unfair, I know - Jani of the unpronounceable last name. Finnish metal guitar hero summa cum laude, playing bass tech for a band his own scene probably laughed at behind their hands. According to what I heard from questioning the other techs, this was officially his first such job. What could he have run before? An eight-track and three pedals? You don't put someone so inexperienced on a Def Leppard world tour and just hand them that sort of responsibility! Sav has the least complicated set-up and still for his previous techs it was a full time job. This kid wanted to be one step up from roadie, that's what he'd get. It pissed me off that he didn't fuck up. That the others liked him.

Yeah, that red - not ginger but bright red - hair, his crooked front tooth, the collection of mismatched tribal and fantasy tats, a face-eating grin when he wanted to that was disconcerting at best and literally insane if one was looking at him straight on... Everything about him bothered me, from his physical imperfections to his weird chirpy, trilling accent. Twenty-fucking-six years old! He had blue eyes. Of course he fucking did. He and Sav were the same height, close to the same build; I'd swear to god he was wearing Sav's clothes around.

Then my mind wandered into the territory of how similar they might be in other ways, which was enough to make me gag. It didn't help that this kid had an arse like... Jesus, if I weren't so jealous... Knowing what Sav was going to do to that arse nightly not ten feet from me unless I could throw a spanner in the works had me seeing more red than that kid's bloody hair. But if he - Jani - dared turn it over and touch my Sav like that... forget red, my rage was white-hot, volcanic, sulphuric fire. No way. Not in _my_ house, not on _my_ bus.

Not on my tour. No one enforced the rule, the unstated but understood line that did not get crossed when it came to relationships between band members and 'support staff'. Discouraged and off limits are not strong enough terms, it's almost like taboo. There is also a non-disclosure agreement in the contract. People have been terminated, but not for years now and it was always due to their approaches on one of us being unwelcome. 

The idea behind it is that it would amount to nepotism, since band members are considered 'bosses' for all that we're like show ponies when on tour. Fact is, I was grasping at straws. All of us had banged the occasional wardrobe chick or hairdresser, rationalised by them being female and also, once that happened, they didn't get invited back the next year. What the crew got up to within their own complex hierarchy, I wasn't sure, but god's honest truth, other than the aforementioned, I've never fucked a roadie or anyone who could be considered crew. 

Let's just say that Sav didn't give a shit about my glaring or bluster, nor what it served to hide. We didn't argue. He simply told me Jani would stay and walked off. For the first time, the dogged, weary love lost its hope and turned into something rancorous, sullen, spiteful. So yes, I kept them apart in every way I could. The travel arrangements, the installation of band meetings after shows, the threat to inform the powers that be. I got the feeling he was humouring me to prove a point, but that underneath he was just as pissed off as I was.

Once, just once, I cornered him alone. The electricity on stage would not go down, I needed to feel the rush of his response. He tried not to show it, how proximity and my breath in his ear was making tremors run through him. Somehow, I knew he hadn't been taken, not like that. He was ripe for it, quivered under my touch and grew hard in my hand. Snarled and snapped at me when I left him like that.

By the end of the tour, everyone's patience had worn thin. I'd had a run-in or two with Jani, who'd got himself injured - of course he did, all the more sympathy for him. It wasn't our best year, financially. Onstage, the chemistry was the same but otherwise, nerves frayed. Rick confronted me about it. He's tough, also more insightful and empathetic than any of us. I might have listened if not for having observed one of the roadies slipping Jani god knew what. What could I even say? Drugs are an established part of this lifestyle. So, nothing, unless he couldn't do his job, and there was no fault to be found, there.

We all went our separate ways that year out of relief. Last I heard by a very circuitous grapevine, Sav had dropped his little paramour the second they got back to England. Jani returned to Finland and the frozen north swallowed him whole, or something like that. 

I hope he can clean himself up, or it would be a needless waste of a life. Doesn't mean I want his life to cross any of ours again. Not just Sav. Word circulated he'd been seen jamming with Phil and Viv on days off a few times, and that they were hard put to keep up but keen to collaborate. It could have been just talk, people always say that shit. It better fucking have been. We don't need a third lead guitarist, we're not Iron Maiden. Any of his influence comes out of Phil or Viv's guitars, I will burn those tracks and swallow the ashes. No one can deny he's good, he's got an endorsement and all. Custom guitars made specially for him. Add that to my 'I hate Jani' list. 

If Mr. L manages a successful career in future, I won't say a bad word - out loud - about him should it come up in an interview that he was once part of our crew. Yes, I plan to follow him online, are you kidding? Not exactly 'keep your enemies closer' but I'm not leaving it to chance. If there's ever a word or even a whiff of him coming 'round, I will go to where ever he is and detonate him where he stands. To never see his face - or his arse, nor the imprint he made on what's mine - again will be too soon. 

I'm going to enjoy the fuck out of singing the words of Sav's overblown, lovelorn, romantic drivel, when it outs. Because it will. I know him. Better than anyone. He's gonna angst like never before in his life and who will be there for him, to listen to his cries of pain and passion, once again to reaffirm that he is it and he is all? I'll look the other way when he occasionally shows up with egg on his face. That's gonna happen. He can't stop himself. But then, neither can I. 

 

Fin.


End file.
